Health Information Systems – Accuracy Improves Patient Care

Submitted by Eileen Haggerty, NetScout Director of Product Marketing

A recent report released in the January 26, 2009 Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that in Texas hospitals where electronic information technology has been implemented, patients seem to have fewer complications and lower death rates.

Advances in information technologies for healthcare include electronic medical records (EMR) systems, picture archiving and communications (PACs) systems, and clinical order entry systems.  The value reported in this study certainly seems to indicate that when patient information is entered upon admission to a healthcare facility and when doctors update their notes electronically, treatment is more complete and accurate.  Mistakes, often associated with incomplete information, are avoided.  And in addition to providing better care to the patients, costs are often lower as well.

Adoption of health information technologies has been slow, but is on the rise.  Recent studies suggest that in facilities with 50 or more physicians, adoption rates of at least Basic or Full EMR systems are as high as 50%. This is likely to grow in the coming months and years if the Obama/Biden healthcare reforms are put in place.  The plan defines their goals in investment in patient electronic records as follows:

“INVEST IN ELECTRONIC HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS. Most medical records are still stored on paper, which makes them difficult to use to coordinate care, measure quality, or reduce medical errors. Processing paper claims also costs twice as much as processing electronic claims. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records.”

As EMR and health information technologies continues to expand, hospitals and health network organizations each have yet another reason to protect the delivery of critical patient care services across their network.  NetScout Systems offers the nGenius and Sniffer solutions to provide predictive analysis that delivers early warnings of network and application degradations with real-time and historical trends and reports for assuring prompt and efficient services delivery assurance.  Please feel free to investigate our solutions to optimize delivery of EMR services in your healthcare network.